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Today I decided to celebrate the return of the sun by visiting Prairie Park. Turns out today Parks and Rec was burning the prairie areas. According to Marty Birrell at the Prairie Park Nature Center, the prairie areas are on a three year burn cycle.

Clicking on the image will take you to my photo stream and more pictures of the burn.

Yesterday one of my readers sent a link to a set of videos called Climate Crock of the Week by Peter Sinclair. These videos provide thoughtful analysis of what we know about climate change. You can find them here on You Tube:

http://www.youtube.com/user/greenman3610

This video in particular gives a reasonable overview of the history of what we know about climate change:

Another reader sent a link to a report from the National Science Foundation about increased release of methane from the arctic shelf. Methane is of particular concern because it is a much more potent green house gas than carbon dioxide. According to the report, more methane currently is released from the shallow waters off of Siberia than from the rest of the ocean. Check the report out for yourself at:

http://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=116532&org=NSF&from=news

Remember that the arctic regions are warming faster than the rest of the world, so much methane locked in the permafrost will be released as the climate warms and since methane itself is such a potent greenhouse gas we could end up with much greater warming than we expect just focusing on carbon dioxide.

One more trend worth mentioning is that according to the New York Times anti-evolutionists at the Discovery Institute are making linkages with climate change skeptics. The idea is to push bills through state legislatures to promote critical analysis of controversial theories. Of course climate change and evolution are mentioned. By taking this tact, anti-evolutionists hope to get their ideas into the public school system under the guise of teaching critical thinking.

This article, Darwin Foes Add Warming to Targets is at: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/04/science/earth/04climate.html?em

This tactic though is not new. It is exactly the tactic taken by the creationists on the Board of Education in Kansas in their Science Standards rewrite of 1999. So the Times is, well behind the times on this one.

Being skeptical and critical is a good thing, but only if it is based on search for truth- not to maintain a cherished metaphysical or ideological position. Quite frankly, I see little of that sort of constructiveness in either global warming skeptics or anti-evolutionists. Lest you think I am being political here I have seen plenty of misplaced skepticism from the Left as well as the Right and it is reprehensible where ever it is found.

My son and I had the pleasure of seeing a large flock of snow geese at Baker Wetlands and got a small feel for what it must have been like when such flocks numbered in the millions. Click the image to see larger sizes on my photostream.

The movie Avatar must really be a great movie because it has struck so many nerves on the left and the right. My favorite (and I use that word advisedly) take is from the loony right by Phil Kline Kansas's former attorney general. I am not going to dissect his whole scree which you can read on his blog:

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2415427/posts?page=64

Kline predictably thinks Avatar is pro-environmental propaganda (he may be correct by the way), for he writes:

"The natives are one with their native planet, including their mother-god Eywa. Eywa is the planet, and the natives reach oneness by entwining fibers from their bodies with the fibers of the planet. This representative sexual union allows them to hear their departed ancestors and gain rhythm with the planet — a séance orgy so to speak. All life on the planet is one, with one spirit and one energy."

Notice how nicely he works in the evil SEX into his rhetoric.

Later on we get the evil bugaboo of evolution:

"Such a prayer represents atheistic Hollywood's dilemma. The only way to reconcile a godless Darwinistic worldview with a deeply spiritual American culture is to convert environmentalism into religion. For what greater purpose for man than to save mother earth, or Pandora? And thus, our purpose in a purposeless world."

And he says that that culture of the Pandorans is Pantheistic. Well that is true I suppose but if Kline would take off his blinders a bit he would see that it is really a practical pantheism. After all, on Pandora evolution (sorry Phil that is the way the world works) has led to a system where the Pandorans can little plug into each other and indeed that is necessary for their survival. So it's not some really some sort of mystical new age Pantheism, but quite practical.

Now we don't have the same explicit connections to our environment that the Pandorans have but we are interconnected much more and need the rest of the biosphere a lot more than Kline seems to care about. At simplest level we are not even a single organism but a community of roughly 100 trillion human cells and 10 times that many bacterial cells that are symbiotic with us. And I don't think that includes the mitochondria which were believed derived from free living bacteria. And examples of how we are interconnected can be multiplied repeatedly at other levels of biological organization.

So Kline and company may scream but maybe we need a good dose of practical pantheism.

OK maybe not, but a fellow in Santa Fe is suing his neighbor because she refuses to turn of her electronic devices when not in use including WiFi. He claims to be suffering from something called an electromagnetic "allergy". The whole thing reminds me of the controversy about alleged risks to human health associated with living near power lines. People who claim to have electromagnetic "allergies" exhibit a host of vague symptoms. I'm trying to keep an open mind about this but the limited information I have seen on this suggests that this sort of "allergy" is largely psychosomatic. But hey, I'm open minded here. After all other animals are sensitive to magnetic fields and electromagnetic radiation so why not people? But does that sensitivity really translate into health risks?

Do electromagnetic "allergies" really exist? Do you think you have this sort of syndrome (a better term than allergy by the way)? Is my new Droid a health risk? Or can I breathe easy and use my G3 and WiFi with impunity?

See this link for details about the man's claim.

poised for fish

the reflection still

like nothing else

One thing that strikes me about people's ability to understand science is that people do not have a good grasp of the span of geological time. A good example is in Lee Gerhard's recent opinion piece in the Journal World, http://www2.ljworld.com/news/2009/dec....

Dr. Gehard makes he following claims:

"Carbon dioxide concentration has been continually rising for nearly 100 years. It continues to rise, but carbon dioxide concentrations at present are near the lowest in geologic history. "

"Temperature change correlation with carbon dioxide levels is not statistically significant. "

Well the first claim is certainly is true, if you for instance inspect this interesting graph:

Geocarb_III-Mine-03.jpg

http://sbvor.blogspot.com/2009/10/climate-change-science-overview.html

But notice the time scale is in millions of years. Indeed if you enlarge the chart and look at the lower right corner where we get to recent history, carbon dioxide levels appear to be higher than at any time in the past 20 million years.

Let's look more closely at recent geological history using ice core data:

icecoredata.jpg

http://atlas.nrcan.gc.ca/site/english/maps/climatechange/figure_1.jpg/image_view

Notice a couple of things. First of all current carbon dioxide concentrations appear way out of line from historical norms over the last 400,000 years. This is relevant because we are subjecting the biosphere to a rapid increase in carbon dioxide not in the evolutionary experience of modern organisms.

Let's turn to Dr. Gehard's second claim of no statistically significant correlation between temperature change and carbon dioxide. This has been examined for the ice core data and the correlation between temperature and atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration turns out to be highly significant. Roughly 89% of the variance in temperature is related to variance in carbon dioxide concentration.

See http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v412/n6846/full/412523a0.html

Of course correlation does not mean causality as the tobacco companies were once found of reminding us, but this tight relationship between temperature and carbon dioxide is quite striking and needs explaining even if, as could be the case, there is some other factor triggering the initial temperature rise. Perhaps Dr. Gehard means something else by the interesting phrase "temperature change" and perhaps he could explain it here and provide references to this. But from my end his essay merely illustrates how much can be unconsciously obscured by examining a time frame that is not relevant to the problem at hand!

I hate year end reviews, which will probably be doubled in number this year since people have this idea that years that end in nine or zero are somehow important. For those that LIKE year end reviews the NY Times has done all the work for you with the 9th Annual Year in Ideas. This review includes semi serious stuff such as the epidemiology of zombies, and the latest in high fashion "Stiletto Claws", to sobering ideas such as the notion that evolutionary innovations in the biosphere have led to mass extinctions "Life's Greatest Hits" to "Lithium in the Water Supply".

Check it out at http://www.nytimes.com/projects/magazine/ideas/2009/

They did miss a few such as iPhones as musical instruments but nobody's perfect.

This is as close to a year end review you will get from me. I promise.

This jumping spider is maybe an 1/8" long. It is currently hanging out among my house plants.

A few months ago I saw a claim that if theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking were in Britain with its socialized medicine he would have been dead by now. I blew it off as another stupid comment but apparently this comment has gotten repeated all over the web. The problem of course is the it is not true as Larry Krauss reminds us in this article in Scientific American:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=war-is-peace

So why do people repeat that sort of tripe?

Krauss asks

"What makes people so susceptible to nonsense in public discourse? Is it because we do such a miserable job in schools teaching what science is all about—that it is not a collection of facts or stories but a process for weeding out nonsense to get closer to the underlying beautiful reality of nature? Perhaps not."

My thought is that whether we are dealing with health care, global warming or various sorts of social issues, we get an emotional high from thinking we are going to win, pull the wool over our opponent's head. Or maybe repetition of simple nostrums and unexamined falsehoods provides us with a sense of security when dealing with the unknown. Maybe such behavior was at one point adaptive maintaining some sort of group cohesion.

Krauss phrases his arguments with examples from the right, but I don't think people of any ideology are immune to this. As I commented in a post to one of my readers it is if we are stuck in a strange attractor or the sort of cycling that a person's brain might get into when they are depressed and can't get out.

As Krauss so ably observes, quoting apparently from an earlier Krauss commentary:

“The increasingly blatant nature of the nonsense uttered with impunity in public discourse is chilling. Our democratic society is imperiled as much by this as any other single threat, regardless of whether the origins of the nonsense are religious fanaticism, simple ignorance or personal gain.”

So take a look at the Krauss article and let me know what you think. Only be careful. Check your falsehoods at the door.